Big ships should be lumbering and slower while smaller ones should be fast and agile.

Also, Sloop of War... I know it has been used by others here and that it's a real class of sail ship but as names go it does nothing for me. There must be something better.

If it were me I would make the Gunboat smaller than the Corvette. A Gunboat is a small coastal patrol vessel (system patrol vessel?) a Corvette is a Fleet Escort or light screening vessel (Deep Space Fleet Element).

A Battlecruiser is still a cruiser, it's just a heavier type of cruiser so the next stage up. Battleships and Dreadnoughts are bigger by far.

not my favorite system for shield but simple and straight forward, corvetts are larger than gunboats, a gunboat is a smaller ship mainly mounting machineguns and maybe recoiless rifles 20mm range in earthspeak, they are not suited to large patrol scopes. Generaly gunboats fit into a specialized class of small ships that are similar to torpedoe boats missile boats rocket boats minelayer minsweeper.

i like the warpdrive rules, though they need to penalize a little more the advantage offset transtionins into or out of warp, ie messing up gunnery or can't shoot at all.

for a more detailed game lifsupport is good, but i ask you what does it do in a space battle scenario. does it represent a max amount of unprotected people that can be on the ship ie slow suffocation for a boarding party and the crew, does it let those same people more or less time to seal a breech once its occured, etc etc .

and i'd jusy call sloops shuttles as theres not mush a space ship 20 studs long can do in a stand up fight. and most shuttles will be this size or larger, just to hold troops and whatnot.

DARN
Heavy Destroyer Class Carrier Hybrid HODGEPODGE
# odds and ends: a motley assortment of things
# patchwork: a theory or argument made up of miscellaneous or incongruous ideas

assault shuttle come in two flavors as infantry landers or weapons platforms with crew space. in the case of infantry landers maybe a mg or 2 with troops piled to the gunwals and armor to shame a battle ship. or the assault shuttle has guns and missiles and bombs maybe armor and troops squeezed in between the ammo cartriges

DARN
Heavy Destroyer Class Carrier Hybrid HODGEPODGE
# odds and ends: a motley assortment of things
# patchwork: a theory or argument made up of miscellaneous or incongruous ideas

also if you have a copy or can get one look up mech creation in the BAttleTECH rule book, basically its several tables id pay attention to the engines table, as it details a sliding scale for ship engines so that large ships can never outmanuever smaller ones

also just for kicks i calced the basic cp for my main fleet ships these numbers include essential crew

Warhead wrote:A Battlecruiser is still a cruiser, it's just a heavier type of cruiser so the next stage up. Battleships and Dreadnoughts are bigger by far.

Actually Battle cruisers are bigger than battleships and trade armour or weapons for speed, i spent a while browsing wikipedia for this.

HMS Hood, the largest battlecruiser ever built, was bigger than any of Britain's battleships until the commissioning of HMS Vanguard in 1946. She was the largest warship afloat before Bismarck, in combat with which Hoodwas destroyed with the loss of all but three of her crew during the Battle of the Denmark Strait

Wasn't Vanguard a Battleship though? Which means what? That the Hood being smaller is... of a lesser class? Oh my... but that would mean...

As Navies are constantly developing better ways to make ships and refitting those they have, ship Class becomes a very fluid thing. They are commissioned and later built, taking considerable time and effort and most likely outdated by the next commissioned idea that hits the table before they're even in the water. They all get sub-catogorised to some extent in an attempt to impose order on the poor lists.

Battlecruiser or Fast BattleshipAlthough the Royal Navy always designated Hood as a battlecruiser, some modern writers such as Anthony Preston have characterised her as a fast battleship, since the Hood appeared to have improvements over the revolutionary Queen Elizabeth-class battleships. On paper, the Hood retained the same armament and level of protection, while being significantly faster.[6] Around 1918, the US naval staff in Great Britain became extremely impressed by the Hood which was described as a "fast battleship", so they advocated that the USN should develop a fast battleship of its own. Ending up, the US continued with their existing designs, the well-protected slow battleship South Dakota-class and the fast, lightly armoured Lexington class battlecruisers

I included everything I liked the look of in my list with the help of some really good novels on the subject and some experience in some space naval combat games. But despite my best efforts, ultimately it is a fiction, just like all space combat. I assumed you would understand that though.

Last edited by Warhead on Sat Aug 08, 2009 3:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Warhead wrote:Sorry for being a prick and correcting you but I always understood a fleet tender or collier to be a Freighter carrying supplies, weapons/ammo/fuel that sort of thing... did you mean to put Frigate?

no frigate is in there so you have a rough idea of the size of the vessel hence why its in ()'s .

DARN
Heavy Destroyer Class Carrier Hybrid HODGEPODGE
# odds and ends: a motley assortment of things
# patchwork: a theory or argument made up of miscellaneous or incongruous ideas